It's good to write. Writing is a kind of therapy. It is a sign and a pathway to good mental health, even if sometimes it doesn't feel at all like that.
Spinning words with others is also a popular activity. No matter how good a person is with words, when it comes to the with-others part, there are some considerations.
Readers are few. Audiences are still there, but readers are few. Some published and reviewed writers I know only have a few readers, their writing groups. The overabundance of television and video have made mostly the only paid writers into craft writers.
Poetry doesn't follow any rules. It is the essence, the source of the genius. Very few geniuses make money. They go unnoticed. Some merge with the greater crowd of craftspeople, professional writers who either have some genius or don't but in almost all cases make their money by using their craft to copy some other genius who was financially successful.
These craftspeople either write for recorded performance or are journalists (daily, weekly, seasonally), these days including bloggers. No doubt the really rich ones write stories. There's like maybe two poets who--nah, there are no poets who are just poets, but like five make money just because they're poets (they hold nominal positions, like Honorary Professor or whatever). A bunch more benefit by being known poets, so they might have to teach, but they only teach one or two classes or they do something for some non-profit--I don't know. But that's good.
Storywriters are the ones we dream about because a person who can write a good story can do so in any dialect. The essence of the soul is more clear because it exists across multiple dimensions. Characters come from all walks of life, but what needs to be known about them is universally human.
That is craft. So the storywriters who earn glory write their own therapy, but they also muster up the willpower to craft stories. Writing must be a daily habit.
For learning this craft, one can copy, copy, copy. Always twist it one's own way, and use one's original language, of course. That is a fine way to begin one's career as a lifelong writer. There may be some other shortcuts, but one has to be recognized by a wide audience to have one's particular point of view mean something worth something.
Otherwise, there is always performance. Many writers write comedy routines. They memorize it and then they stand up at open mic nights at comedy clubs.
Always there is the issue with the individual writer and the group. Writing can serve both. The group can be quite small or quite large.
Okay, now you can call pompous for pretending to think that you wanted to read that.
- Bones
